We will continue to plan around four month release cycles, but will revise the plan monthly based on progress, new issues, changing priorities, etc. Orion plans are found in the [https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/eclipse.orion Orion project portal].

Contents

Overview

For the past couple of years, the Orion project has followed an abbreviated version of the classic Eclipse milestone development process. Each release consisted of two 6 week milestones, followed by a 5 week end-game, for a roughly 4 month total release cycle. This release cadence works well enough for classic software that is released and delivered to customers, but is not acceptable for Orion consumers building hosted software services. Four months is far too long to wait to update a web application. Other related web technology such as browsers and web frameworks are releasing much faster, and security bugs often require very fast (even zero day) turnaround.

This page captures the Orion community's efforts to move from three releases a year, to an interim goal of releasing stable builds once a week.

Planning

We will continue to plan around four month release cycles, but will revise the plan monthly based on progress, new issues, changing priorities, etc. Orion plans are found in the Orion project portal.

The build is promoted as stable with the naming convention S# where # is the sequential stable build number since start of the release cycle

Release process

Every four months a stable build is promoted as a release.

Testing

Automated testing

Every dev and stable build runs a full suite of automated unit tests against both client and server components. Further integration testing is done by "self hosting" at orion.eclipse.org prior to release.

Controlled access for new features

Significant new features should be introduced in the main code base early, either on a separate, unlinked URL, or by using some form of feature toggle. Some options for implementing feature toggles in Orion:

Put the UI portions of the new feature in a plugin that is not installed by default. Early adopters need to install the plugin to get the feature.

A major page overhaul can be done by introducing a duplicate page that is not linked elsewhere. Early adopters need to know to navigate to that URL to see the new page. The feature is launched by switching URLs to the new page. Once feature is accepted the old page should be deleted to avoid cruft.

Use a temporary setting that is disabled by default, and adopters need to know to turn it on. Once ready for more exposure the default can be changed to on, and then remove the setting entirely.

Use a query argument in the URL to control access to a feature. User needs to alter the URL to see the feature.